Other People's Lives
by pdragon76
Summary: Sam learns a little something about grass and fences.  Dean gets his ass handed to him.  Large on shameless whump.  Warning for language and violence.


**Disclaimer: All things Supernatural belong to Kripke not me (Rinse & Repeat)**

**A/N: Unbeta'd so all niggles, wtf's and humdingers are mine, all mine. Inspired by challenge #8 at foundficspn over at LJ**

He doesn't remember what happened.

But he knows he blacked out, and that he's scaring Sam. Dean knows 'cause Sam's swearing at him as he drags him along the ground by the collar of his jacket. His sleeves are riding up, jagging his shoulder and that's not good because his shoulder is five kinds of fucked. He tries to dig a heel into the ground - help Sam out, push back to take some of the pressure off - but Sam's not trying to be gentle and they're moving too fast.

There's movement down past his feet and all of sudden the back of his skull is cracking off the cement. Sam's Glock is going off CRACK CRACK CRACK up above and shell casings are tinkering off the ground around him, petite little impacts at complete odds with the casual cacophony above his face. He can smell burnt gun powder.

Then there's a brief silence, and Dean can hear breathing. He doesn't know if it's his or Sam's. He can't tell, but there's panic in that breathing and he knows that neither of them are prone to anxiety. There's something damp inside his jacket. He's wet. How did he get wet? He fumbles at his shirt, lifts his head and….oh. OH. _That's blood. That's a lot of blood. _

He doesn't remember what happened.

Then Sam's gripping his jacket and he wants to say _Wait_ because he's not ready to move again. But his mouth is too dry and his thoughts are too slow and then the heels of his boots are stuttering off the concrete and Sam's swearing again.

Dean thinks: _Sam hardly ever really swears._

* * *

'When was the last time you bought a bottle of shampoo?' 

Dean freezes, coffee cup to his lips. He cocks an eyebrow.

'I dunno,' he responds irritably around the polystyrene cup.

'Seriously, when was the last time?'

Dean takes a gulp of coffee and thinks about it.

'Dude, I really dunno. Fuck made you ask me that?'

Sam looks up from the café table leg. 'There's a receipt stuck to the pavers down here. S'got shampoo on it and I was just thinking, we never buy shampoo.'

'We get free shampoo. Perk of the job.' Dean makes an approximation of the size of the complimentary motel bottles. He stands up. 'You coming or you gonna sit here pining for anti-frizz technology.'

Sam scrunches his nose. 'I'll pass.'

'Last chance, Sammy.'

'You go. I'm good.'

'Two feet long man. You sure?'

'Knock yourself out.'

Dean shakes his head, disappointed.

'It's like you were switched at birth.'

Sam laughs and waves his brother away down the street. He can see the appeal but he just isn't hungry. Dean hasn't shut up about it since they passed the sign on the way to the motel. Two foot long sandwiches. From the sign, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was the town's only claim to fame. Sam can see the entire main drag from where he's sitting outside the café and thinks maybe it is.

He leans forward, rests his elbows on his knees and stretches his back. He's been asleep in the car for most of the morning and now his spine feels like a silly straw. The waitress comes by with a pot of coffee and he nods, takes another refill. Two foot long sandwich? He figures he's got a half hour to kill. Hopes he has a half hour. _Remember to chew, Dean._

The receipt catches his eye again. Shampoo. Hair colour. Bath pearls. Those little round things, right? Jessica had them. Sam can't remember the last time he tried to fold himself into a tub, but Jess soaked herself stupid at their apartment in Stanford. She was part freaking fish.

The receipt is from Walmart, the complex just down the road. Across the top run the familiar words Always Low Prices Always Walmart. Beneath them in neat type: Manager Jeff. Sam doesn't know anything about Jeff. Doesn't particularly think that running a Walmart sounds like such a great career either. But he'll bet London to a brick-on that Jeff has some bath pearls in his vanity. Probably buys shampoo as well as sells it. Has nice dinners with his wife, takes the kids to little league on the weekends.

It all adds up to a pretty appealing fantasy life from where Sam is sitting, sipping another bad coffee in another hick town about to start figuring out who's been butchering girls in their spare time. They're all starting to get that bleed into each other. He needs a break. From the car, from Dean, from this job.

Sam rubs his thigh absently. He can still feel the bruise under the denim. He'll bet Jeff doesn't have a technicolour contusion the size of Nebraska wrapped around his leg from his ass to his knee. Sam can't remember the last time he _didn't_ have a bruise somewhere. His knuckles and his elbow are still scratched up from the spill he took over a fence in Salt Lake City three days ago.

He yawns.

He's pretty sure Jeff doesn't have to sleep in cars or wake up to find his brother has drawn a dick on his cheek while he is asleep. _I mean, Jesus._ If he hadn't caught his reflection in the car window who knows how long Dean would have stayed po-faced about that one.

'You're five years old, you know that?' he'd called as he gave it a spit and polish in the side mirror.

Dean didn't look back. Just gave him the _gotcha_ salute without turning around, already halfway into the café.

Yeah. Jeff the Walmart Manager? Sam's thinks that guy has it _made._

* * *

'It's him.' 

Dean says it as they hit the asphalt in the parking lot. He pulls up and rounds on Sam, hands on hips. Sam shakes his head.

'What?'

'It's him. He's carving up these girls. Well, not him, but…you know.' He waggles his fingers vaguely in front of his eyes. It's apparently the Winchester universal sign for possession.

'How can you possibly know that after a 10 minute conversation?'

Dean shrugs. 'I dunno. I just know.'

'Well, before we go all guns blazing on Jeff the Walmart Manager, I'm gonna need a little more than _I just know_.'

Dean gives him an impatient look and reaches into his back pocket for his wallet. He flips it open and retrieves a folded up piece of paper with two numbers scrawled across it.

'Gimme your cell.'

'What? Why?'

'I left mine in the car. Give it.' He holds out his hand. Sam digs in his jacket pocket, huffs a little, and tosses him the cell.

'What are you doing?'

'I'm gonna find out which of these cars is his and then I'm gonna rub your nose in his demonic possession. That alright with you?'

Sam holds up his hands. Fine. Dean is probably right. Sam spends hours poring over the information they have, climbs mountains of clues to reach the same conclusion Dean has been instinctively perched on all along. He takes the ski lift every time and Sam, to be honest, thinks it's sort of cheating. He doesn't work hard enough for it. But he isn't often wrong. It happens. But not often.

While he waits for the dispatch to pick up, Dean juts his chin in the direction of the Walmart sliding doors.

'What was Son of Sam's last name?'

Sam gives him a dark look. 'Dude, little document called the Constitution. You might wanna lose the black hood and take a look at Article Three some time. Sutton. Jeff Sutton.'

Dean turns suddenly away from him and Sam hears the velvety smooth creep into his tone. A second later he laughs and Sam rolls his eyes. A little flirtation gets him a long way though, and a badge number later he's scanning the lot and then pointing Sam towards a blue Datsun 120Y two rows over. He repeats the registration out loud and Sam cranes around the cars to see the plates. Bingo. He gives him the thumbs up.

Dean claps the phone shut, grinning like a Cheshire cat.

'Datsun. _Awesome._ Those babies pop open like a Pez dispenser.'

* * *

'I told you, man. I knew it.' 

Sam is still shaking his head incredulously. They are tailing the Datsun from three blocks back. It's become clear where they are headed and Sam has to admit, it looks pretty damning. Jeff is headed straight for the warehouse where the bodies have all been found. At 2am in the morning. In his sulfur sprinkled Datsun.

Dean's having trouble being modest about his chip placement. 'Come on, man, repeat after me: My brother is an awesome demon spotter.'

'It doesn't prove anything. We just found sulfur residue in his car. It just means the demon was there.' Sam's having trouble letting Jeff be a demon. He wants him to be at home, shampooing his hair or handing his wife the bath pearls. Doing anything but carving up women in a deserted warehouse ten miles past the city limits.

'Well, either way, this guy's got demons riding shotgun in his Datsun 120Y? I'm keeping him on the pointy end of the Glock, thank you very much. Besides, guy's drivin' around in a car that looks like a fuckin' jellybean. This is a mercy killing, Sam.'

'So you just knew, huh? Like a feeling in your bones?'

Dean shrugs, shifts in his seat.

'This guys been doing this a long time, right? Which means he's been possessed for a long time. You remember Wichita?'

Sam does. Dean doesn't need to say anything else. He remembers that morning beside the train tracks. Mostly he remembers their father shouting at Dean to get Sam back to the car. But the only person Lionel Nasrath had been any danger to in the end was himself. He wrestled a moment of clarity from the demon possessing him and used it wisely. Sam still has a very clear image in his head of Lionel's lips clamping around the muzzle of the gun. He remembers the sharp report of the shot and the mist of red that haloed out behind his skull as he fell. At the time, it felt ugly and confusing and…just _wrong_. It wasn't until many years later that Sam understood the desperate courage of that moment. He understands it now.

He thinks all this and then says: 'Yeah, I remember Wichita.'

Dean nods at the windshield.

'Jeff Sutton, he's got that same look.'

'What look?' Sam tries to remember what look Lionel had about him before he blew his own head off cornered beside some railway tracks. He can't. But clearly Dean can. He was a little older and standing a little closer.

'Like he's just beggin' for it to be over.'

And that's something both of them can get in touch with. They drive in silence until it bugs Dean and he turns the stereo on.

* * *

Dean's checking his Glock at the trunk of the Impala when Sam asks. 

'We're not killing this guy, right?'

Dean looks at him as though he's suggested clubbing seals on the weekend. 'No, man. You just…just get him on the ground and not moving so we can try and get this thing outta him.'

Sam takes the Glock Dean hands him and hitches it in the back of his jeans. 'And if we can't?'

The look Dean shoots him is about as emotionally void as Sam has ever seen him. It's a Dean he doesn't see very often, and he's glad of that. Dean holds up his Glock and raises his eyebrows.

'Forty girls, Sam. We can't get it outta him? Then yeah, we're killing this guy.'

And there it is. Decision made. Sam can't get there. Won't. But Dean is all about lines. Not boundaries, but lines. And lines can be moved and crossed and re-ruled.

Sam's barely done feeling uncomfortable about it when Dean looks up sharply across the dark of the parking lot to the warehouse. There's a shadow there, against the wall near the front entrance. It's not moving, and when Sam darts his eyes left of the shadow he gets a better look at it out of his peripheral vision.

It's Jeff, and he's watching them.

'Fuck,' Dean whispers, and gives Sam a look that suggests both of them are idiots of grand proportion. 'When the fuck did he come out?'

And then Jeff runs. He disappears back into the dilapidated warehouse and Dean takes off towards the entrance like a shot. Sam flinches instinctively after him, has to throw a hand back to slam the trunk of the Impala as he goes.

'Dean! WAIT!'

But he doesn't. He never does.

* * *

Inside the warehouse Dean brings the Glock up and slows while his eyes adjust to the deeper gloom. The roof of the building has sections missing and the full moon provides enough ambient light for Dean to think it's a fortuitous twist of lunar fate. He can see incredibly well. Jeff's footsteps are pounding down the office hallway and when Dean rounds the edge of the first office all that's left is the swinging door through to the factory floor at the end of the hall. He follows at an urgent jog and when he reaches the door, he twists and slams it with his shoulder, elbow popping up as it snaps back. You only ever really cop a door in the face once. It pays to learn fast in this business. 

By the time he does a sweep of the warehouse, a shadowy Jeff is disappearing around the corner where the factory floor doglegs at the southern end. Dean hugs the plywood down the length of the wall, arm outstretched and leading with the Glock. By the time he hits the corner he's moving pretty fast, rounds it straight into -

_Yankee fucking Stadium. _

Jeff swings the pallet plank edge on, channeling Babe Ruth. Dean gets his left arm up before it hits him in the face but it costs him. Something in his forearm snaps like fresh celery and his gun clatters away across the dock floor.

_HELLO._

His feet slide as he goes down and he cracks hard off the cement floor on his right shoulder.

_Motherfucker! _Intelligent thought hitches a ride with the air on the way out of his lungs. He curls on himself instinctively and it's a good thing he does, because Jeff isn't done with him yet.

'Stop. Following. Me!' Jeff is shrieking.

He punctuates each word with a boot. He gets a few good kicks in before Dean can roll away to protect his ribs. By the time he does, he's pretty sure it's not just his arm that's broken. _Fucking steel capped boots. Motherfucker is wearing FUCKING STEEL CAPPED BOOTS. _

Then Sam is hollering: 'HeyHeyHeyHEYHEY!'

And Dean thinks: _About fucking time you tardy son of a bitch. I'm gettin' my ass handed to me here. _

Jeff's on top of Dean by the time Sam gets the Glock up and aimed and he can't get a shot he can trust. So he angles up and fires a shot into the far factory wall, trying to get Jeff's attention. It works. He looks up, and Sam goes cold inside.

They're not dealing with Jeff anymore. The demon's got this from here on in. Sam doesn't know where the knife has come from but it's there and it's in his hand and that's bad news for Dean because Sam can see from where he's standing that the top of Dean's game is gone. He's got Jeff by the wrist and he's trying to keep some distance between the end of the knife and his chest. His whole arm is shaking and Sam can see that Jeff isn't even breaking a sweat here. He lowers the muzzle of the Glock again, steps sideways to alter the trajectory, find a line that doesn't include vital parts of his brother. But it takes a second and Jeff uses it to shift his weight up and down.

The knife sinks into his left shoulder to the hilt and Dean makes a strangled, surprised noise that drains every drop of Sam's blood into his feet. He squeezes off a shot but his caution sends it wide, and Jeff hauls Dean up by the front of his shirt and uses him for cover.

'Do you know how many people I've killed in here?' he shouts.

Sam doesn't care. Two or one hundred. It doesn't make any difference to him. Dean has a knife in him. He has to find a way to fix this. Right now. He flicks his attention between the demon and Dean. His brother drops his chin, looks at the hilt of the knife in his shoulder. He winces, closes his eyes.

'I don't care,' Sam shouts back to him, staring down the sights of the Glock.

Jeff's hand snakes up under Dean's armpit and he grabs the hilt of the knife, pulls it slowly downward. Dean arches off the floor of the dock. He's suddenly very fucking awake, eyes wide. Sam's finger twitches on the trigger again but Dean turns his face and inadvertently covers his shot.

'_Damn it Dean,'_ he sends the words on a breath down his arm. '_Move.'_

Jeff's turning the blade and the heel of Dean's right boot twitches and bounces off the floor twice. Sam knows he's white water rafting far beyond his pain threshold and when his eyes roll back and he gags Sam is done being cautious. He breathes out, squeezes the trigger. He knows exactly where the bullet is going. He's not going to miss and he's not going to hit Dean. Those things just aren't options anymore. The round punches through Jeff's left arm and sends him reeling backwards. Dean goes with him. Sam hears the back of his head crack off the concrete and he stays where he lands, doesn't move.

Sam knows that Jeff isn't down for good, so he's moving as soon as the shot is fired. Dean's out cold when he slides to a halt beside him and Sam's hands hover over the blade in his shoulder, then he pulls it out instinctively. It's a wild, thoughtless act of panic and protection that he immediately regrets. You don't remove a foreign object. He _knows_ that. It stems blood flow. But he's sure as hell not putting it back in now it's out so he just grabs a handful of Dean's jacket at the collar and pulls. Dean is really fucking heavy. Sam forgets he's six foot one and built. He's suddenly in complete agreement with the personal trainers on those late night infomercials. Muscle weighs more than fat. _No shit. _

'Come on Dean, wake up.' He's dragging him backwards towards the front of the warehouse and then all of a sudden he feels a little lighter, less limp. He looks down and Dean's coming round. He's dazed and disoriented, but he's awake and Sam feels like giving someone a high five. He settles for a string of relieved expletives.

* * *

Sam pulls him up against some crates near the front entrance of the warehouse and Dean suddenly remembers Lionel Nasrath, or what's left of Lionel's head, resting in the grass beside the train tracks all those years ago. It shifts his stomach and he thinks that's odd, because he's not normally squeamish. 

'Dean.'

Sam's voice is urgent, and he snaps his head up to look at him. He overshoots, and can't correct. Everything about him feels elastic, imprecise.

'Car's right outside, we're nearly there but I gotta get you up.'

Dean thinks this is a bad idea. He can see why Sam wants to, because the dragging isn't exactly blowing either of their skirts up and there are steps outside. Dean remembers there are steps now. He took them in three long strides on the way in. But he's got the skinny on the inside track and he knows standing up is a really bad idea. He tries to convey all of this by screwing up his nose. He's not really up to a conversation about it right now.

'I know,' Sam says grimly. He grips the front of Dean's shirt with both hands. 'I know.'

He calls Sam a motherfucking son of a bitch on the way up to his feet. And Sam seems okay with that. Like he knows he is.

They get about halfway to the car before everything starts to swim again and Dean's knees go. Sam stops, renews his grip on the back of his brothers jeans and leans to take his weight.

'_Easy_,' he's saying. '_Easy, easy, easy_.'

_No, it's NOT, _Dean thinks_. Pick another fucking word. _

At the car he props Dean against the back passenger door. Sam's going through his pockets, trying to find the keys to the Impala and Dean wants to help him out but he has no clue which pocket wins bingo. He starts to fold again and Sam steps up against him, pins him to the car with his hip, both hands still on reconnaissance in his multiple layers of clothing.

'How many fucking pockets do you have?'

_Twenty-five_, Dean thinks and wants to laugh. But instead his head tips and comes to rest against Sam's collarbone. His brother smells like engine oil, like the inside of the warehouse, and Dean's stomach pitches. He retches and almost holds it, but the smell combined with the jostle of Sam's shoulder as he searches for the keys flips the toggle on the scales. Sam almost cops it straight down the right leg of his jeans but he backs up in time. The keys are jingling in his hand as he steps away.

Sam manhandles him into the front seat and leaves him there while he goes to the trunk. Now that Dean's down and nothing's required of him on the fighting gravity front he feels comparatively fantastic. The inside of the car seems quiet, his breathing very fast and very loud. He can hear the muffled urgency of Sam throwing things around in the trunk. The Impala's engine pops and pings, cooling in the night air. How long had they been in the warehouse? It couldn't have been very long. He tries again to remember what has happened, but then suddenly the door is opening and Sam is leaning in. He flicks on the interior light and then his palm is against the back of Dean's neck and he's pulling him forward, wanting him to swallow something.

Dean resists. _Did you not see the pukefest? So not hungry, dude._

But Sam's pushing insistent fingers between his lips and then he tastes something acrid. He tries to get whatever it is down, just to get the taste out of his mouth but he can't rustle up enough spit. His mouth is the Mojave and Sam realizes, picks up a bottle of half drunk coke from the floor of the Impala and twists the top off, brings it to his lips.

It's flat and warm and Dean knows it's gonna be unappreciated when it gets where it's going. He clamps his mouth shut after the first swallow and Sam takes the hint, withdraws the bottle.

'You can't throw them back up, man.'

The pills he's just swallowed. And Dean understands even before Sam elaborates: 'You gotta keep 'em down or you're really gonna hate me when we get back to the motel.'

Dean tilts against the car frame and concentrates on stilling his roiling gut. Sam's messing around with his shirt and his jacket and he knows there's bound to be some unwelcome prodding and poking any second now. He wishes Sam could wait until the pills do whatever they're going to do but he knows he can't and he won't. So instead he treads the internal water, tries to find a rhythm in between the nausea and the thudding pulse in his shoulder, the ice-sharp ragging of his ribs and his arm. The hole beneath his collarbone feels like it's five miles wide, like it goes on throbbing beyond the car out into the lot. He latches onto that, tries to externalize, separate himself from it. Sam yanks on the front of his shirt and buttons ping off the window and the dash. He's almost found a place where he can keep his nose above the drink when Sam unceremoniously jams a gauze in against his shoulder. It sends him straight up through the roof of the Impala into a blinding white relief.

* * *

Sam's leaning too hard on the gas and he knows it. The roads are deserted and he can't seem to care if they get pulled over anyway. It seems like a legitimate excuse to go to the hospital. 

He glances over at Dean. The Sevredol he's given him has kicked in and he's riding the results, temple against the passenger window. It means the edge is off the pain but he's also far too off his dial to be doing anything about staunching the blood flow. Sam feels a lonely flush of responsibility for the both of them. It's not something he's used to.

'Dean.' It's a selfish desire for the comfort of contact and Sam knows it.

Dean flickers an eyebrow and licks his lips. Sam sees his throat work around a hard swallow. It's not much but it's a response and Sam finds some solace in it.

He turns his attention back to the road. _You killed Jeff Sutton back there_, a little voice in his head says, and it's not his but Jessica's. _You killing people for a living these days, baby?_ But he can't think about that now. Dean first.

Guilt later.

* * *

Sam doesn't realize Dean's Glock is missing until he's standing over the motel sink scrubbing the wicked blood from the cuticles of his fingers. 

_Fuck._

He dries his hands and goes back into the room, pauses at Dean's bedside. Then he goes through the bloodied clothes balled up on the floor. He knows the gun isn't there - he would have found it when he was cutting Dean's shirt off. But he checks anyway. Then he heads out to the Impala, feeling a stab of uneasiness at leaving the room but knowing this can't wait. He damn near takes the car apart but it's not there. He even checks the trunk, knowing he didn't throw it in there, knowing it _can't _be there. It has to be back at the warehouse.

_Fuck a freaking DUCK._

He goes back into the motel room and paces a bit. He knows he has to go back to the warehouse, and he has to do it now, before anyone finds Jeff and the cops arrive. He knows it's highly unlikely, but he imagines them there already, bagging the Glock with Dean's freaking prints all over it.

He chews his lip, stares at his brother.

He doesn't want to leave him. He thinks about coming back with the Glock to find Dean dead and it sends a sharp skewer of panic through his thought process. He desperately wishes there was someone he could call, but they are hundreds of miles from Bobby, or the roadhouse, or anyone else Sam can think of who might be able to help. For a long minute, he seriously debates knocking on the door of the next room and asking them to sit with his busted up unconscious brother while he goes looking for the handgun they have misplaced. But he can't think of any reason for Dean's condition that would keep any sane person from immediately calling the police. He's a fucking train wreck.

It's childish but he wishes he was someone else. He stands there and wills himself to be someone else. But when he opens his eyes, he's still standing in the motel room. Dean is still battered and sleeping on the bed in front of him.

And the Glock is still in the warehouse, waiting to undo them.

He rubs his temple with the flat of his hand. He has to do this. He looks at his watch, back at Dean.

'This is only gonna take, like forty five minutes.' He says it out loud, even though he knows Dean is too far gone to hear it. 'Just don't…' And he can't finish that sentence.

So instead he just goes.

When he starts the car the stereo comes on and he jumps. He doesn't remember hearing it on the way back from the warehouse. But it must have been on. He flicks it off. Can't have noise right now. There's no room for it in his head.

But half a mile down the road he's thinking about Dean's fist balled in the motel bed sheet. He can hear the doped, unguarded noises he made while Sam irrigated the shoulder and all of a sudden he can't get that stereo up loud enough. He gets a hot, desperate feeling and thumps the steering wheel hard, twice. He's mad at himself, mad at Jeff, mad at Dean. He should have waited. _Why didn't he wait for me?_

_Why does everything always have to turn to shit? _

* * *

The warehouse is dark when he arrives. No blue and red flashing lights, no cameras going off, no yellow tape. There's just the eerie still darkness. And now that he's here, he realizes he left the knife he pulled out of Dean on the warehouse floor too. He remembers the wet slide of the blade out of flesh and it makes his gut dip and the back of his teeth tingle. 

He finds the Glock lying in the shadows between two pallets where the warehouse doglegs. Jeff is lying nearby, a silent ominous lake of blood pooling out from beneath his torso. His eyes are open and dull.

Sam doesn't really want to look but he can't look away. Doesn't feel he should. The demon is gone. What's left is just Jeff. He's dead, and Sam knows he did this. A sudden intense wave of exhaustion rolls over him. He wants to cry. _Why did you have to be the one killing these girls?_ He feels as though something has been taken away from him, that he's been deceived somehow. Sam had coveted Jeff's life only to find the cancer in his own extends far enough to soil even his harmless fantasies. It doesn't seem fair. It makes him angry.

He's angry and he's sad and he's exhausted all the way back to the motel until a shovel of anxiety buffets him at the door to the room. He opens the door, rips the band-aid off quickly, and crosses straight to the bed without hesitating.

When he hears the quiet whistle of his breath and finds a thready but persistent pulse with his fingers beneath Dean's jaw, the relief is so palpable he makes no attempt to control it. He slumps into the chair beside the bed and lets the tears come. He doesn't know who they are for. Jeff, Dean or himself. Maybe all three. He thinks of all the awful things that have happened in the last two years and it feels like a very long time since he last cried. And that right there seems the worst of his crimes.

* * *

Sam wakes with a start from a dream in which Jeff is pedaling shampoo at a boardwalk market stall. He's disoriented and it takes him a minute to figure out where he is, which state, which motel…and then he's bolt upright in his seat, raking a guilty hand down his face. How could he have fallen asleep? 

Dean is restless. Sam coaxes him out from beneath a thinning veneer of Sevredol long enough to get another painkiller and a double dose of antibiotic down. Dean's confused but blessedly compliant. They can't afford an infection. It's the last of the Sevredol and the antibiotics, but Sam knows he can scam a couple of prescriptions with the stolen pad in the first aid kit. He has no idea how they are going to get Dean's arm set without the ER calling the police. It's going to have to wait until Dean's got it together enough to conceal the knife wound. It's not ideal but it's going to have to wait.

He gets up and goes to the window, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes and stretching. He's got stuff to do. He doesn't want to leave Dean again but right now he's okay and there might not be an opportunity later. Really, it's as good a time as any. He goes into the bathroom and fishes the stolen prescription pad out of the kit and heads for the door.

* * *

He sees it on his way out of the pharmacy. Waiting at the lights it hits his shoe, flaps over the toe and sticks there for a second. He almost can't believe it. It's the receipt from the café. Always Low Prices, Always Walmart. Manager Jeff. It's the exact same fucking receipt. Shampoo. Bath Pearls. Chocolate. Sam wonders where that chocolate is right now, being lifted to his wife's lips or cooling on a fridge shelf. Sam sees Jeff lying cold on the floor of the warehouse, waiting to be discovered along with his sins. It's a guilty knowledge. His family are still blissfully unaware, but Sam knows. He knows because he emptied his Glock into Jeff's demon-possessed chest. He wants to stop at a payphone and call in an anonymous tip. But he can't risk that until Dean is ready to move and they can clear out afterwards. 

Sam glances around the street at the flow of foot traffic. He is acutely aware of the façade, the fathoms beneath the surface of each and every passer-by.

_Jeff the Walmart Manager. That guy has it made. _

* * *

Thanks for reading... 


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